Tag: Regina Hall

Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2015

Spinning Platters film critics present their top 10 films of 2015

Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chad Liffmann each share their ten favorite films of 2015. Here is Carrie’s list, presented in alphabetical order. (And you can find Chad’s here.)

1.) Brooklyn

Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) shares a tender moment with boyfriend Tony (Emory Cohen).

The immigrant experience in America is exquisitely captured in director John Crowley’s finely crafted film about love, loss, and longing in 1950s Brooklyn. Based on the novel by Colm Tóibín, Nick Hornby’s screenplay presents us with the intrepid young Irish woman Eilis, who leaves her family in the Irish countryside for adventure and opportunity in New York. Saoirse Ronan suberbly conveys Eilis’s gradual shift from shy newcomer to confident cosmopolitan. Called back home for a family emergency, Eilis must choose between familiar comforts and new possibilities, and Ronan depicts Eilis’s struggle with heartrending openness and aching honesty. Emory Cohen and Domhnall Gleeson, as competing suitors on opposite sides of the Atlantic, also deliver strong, sharply drawn performances.

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Film Review: About Last Night

About this remake: Fresh humor balances romantic comedy clichés

Michael Ealy's Danny watches the game while Joy Bryant's Debbie watches him in About Last Night.
Michael Ealy’s Danny watches the game while Joy Bryant’s Debbie watches him in About Last Night.

Hollywood is big on remakes these days; this week alone, three updates of 1980s movies have opened (RoboCop on Wednesday, and Endless Love and About Last Night today). Whether there is a lack of decent original screenplays right now, or whether aging Gen X studio execs are nostalgic for the stories of their formative days is hard to say, but the phenomenon does beg the question of whether these remakes need to be made at all, and, more importantly, whether they are any good in their own right. The new About Last Night is a particularly special case, since it is not only a remake of a film, but is also a remake of a film based on a play, which makes the new version especially far removed from its source material. Does that matter?  Fortunately, in this case, not so much. Director Steven Pink, who apparently has a fondness for the 1980s (he directed the very funny ’80s time travel movie Hot Tub Time Machine) has tweaked the material enough to make his new version modern, fresh, and very funny. Continue reading “Film Review: About Last Night”